Is Five stuck on five in fifth?

by Richard Eyre, Media Week 05-Sep-06

All things considered, Five has achieved a lot. Carving out its share from the highly competitive, brand loyal, fast fragmenting UK television market was no small thing. Before it could even start on building an audience, Channel Five, as it then was, had to get us all to retune our videos.

And still today, the lucrative South Coast is off limits terrestrially
since the frequency overlaps with the Belgian air force or
something.

Yet successive tenacious management teams, unintimidated by the hurdles,

have plugged away to build a tidy 5% share of TV viewing. But is this

where the story stops? Has Five now joined the ranks of "traditional
television" whose share can only go down?

Without a silver bullet, it's hard to see what the company can now do to
push its audience higher. Its dependence on US imports is greater than
the other terrestrial channels, which is a vulnerable place to be.

Programmes like CSI, its biggest ratings winner, are traded on the open
market where content owners' loyalty is to the highest bidder. Tough
when each of your major competitors not only has larger acquisition
budgets but also a suite of channels to help pay for and cross-promote
expensive shows.

Like Sky, Five has been unable to afford returning series big enough to
penetrate audience loyalties to longer established shows on BBC, ITV and
even C4.

But there is a silver bullet if Bertelsmann, which now wholly owns the
channel, decides that fifth place on a 5% share is not its idea of
success. Because Bertelsmann also owns Fremantle, makers of some of the
best known shows on British TV - real ratings drivers for Five's
competitors.

When their contracts are up, there is nothing to stop Bertelsmann
switching The Bill and The Price is Right from ITV1 and Neighbours from
BBC1.

It's a high risk, even reckless, strategy which would shift value from
the content business to the broadcast business, but there is no doubt
that audiences and advertisers would follow these firm favourites along
the dial, fuelling a bigger programme budget and finally making sense of
the companies' shared ownership.

- Richard Eyre is a former CEO of Fremantle (then called Pearson TV) and
a former director of Channel Five.